The present invention generally relates to cabinets for reach-in coolers, and more particularly to a cabinet door having a window for viewing the contents of the cabinet, but minimizing heat loss to the environment.
Refrigerators and freezers are usually designed without windows to minimize the heat loss to the outside environment. The contents of household refrigerator and freezer units are sufficiently known, and energy conservation is sufficiently important, to negate the need for continuous viewing access to the interior of the units. In commercial and merchandiser designs, however, refrigerators and freezers often include glass doors to allow patrons to see the types and brands of food stocked therein. While providing a convenience to patrons of commercial establishments, these glass doors allow significant heat loss to occur. Examples of such doors are shown or described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,416,122 to Johnson, 4,941,289 to Rolek, and 3,712,078 to Maynard. Additionally, storage and food service coolers used, for example, in grocery store storage rooms and restaurants usually do not include glass doors. While the absence of glass doors minimizes heat loss to the environment, lack of knowledge regarding the contents of the coolers may actually cause a greater heat loss than would providing the storage cooler with a glass door. For instance, in a grocery store, and most especially in a restaurant, employees often open and close cooler doors while looking for a certain food or other stock. Due to the constant flow of stock into and out of storage coolers, it may be impractical for one to reliably know the contents of a storage cooler at any given time. This is especially true when shift work is involved at the establishment. In that case, employees on one shift may have no idea what types of food or other stock was used or stocked, or where the stock was placed, on an earlier shift. Also, when numerous identical or similar coolers are located side-by-side, one may forget in which cooler it was that one placed a food or other stock. Therefore, to determine whether a certain food or other stock is located within a storage cooler, one must open the cooler door and look into the cooler. Opening the cooler door allows refrigerated air to escape from the cooler to the environment, thereby increasing the amount of energy required to maintain the cooler at the necessary temperature. This problem is exacerbated when there are numerous storage coolers within which stock is stored.
The use or absence of glass doors in merchandiser, food service and household refrigeration units provokes divergent problems in the refrigeration art. For example, while it is desirable to have continuous viewing access to the interior of refrigeration units, the heat loss associated with glass doors makes their implementation impractical in household and food service units, and a necessary inefficiency in merchandiser units. Thus, it is desirable to develop a refrigerator and freezer cabinet that will permit one to view the interior thereof, without excessive heat loss from the cabinet to the environment.